The present invention relates to pieces of furniture in general, and more particularly to improvements in pieces of furniture of the type wherein a frame is connected with several legs. Typical examples of such pieces of furniture are tables or chairs.
For the sake of simplicity, the following description of prior art pieces of furniture and of the improved piece of furniture will refer largely to chairs. It will be understood, however, that the invention can be embodied in many other pieces of furniture of the general class having three or more legs and a frame which extends between and is connected to such legs.
It is well known to assemble a wooden chair from three or more legs and from a frame which is connected with the legs and supports the seat. As a rule, or at least in many instances, the frame and the legs are made of wood. The legs may but need not extend upwardly beyond the frame (e.g., two of the legs can extend upwardly to support a back rest), and the frame and/or the legs may but need not be provided with arm rests. In most instances, the frame includes four discrete sections each of which is individually secured to two neighboring legs. For such purpose, each of the legs has two sockets or through holes, and the respective sections of the frame have smaller-diameter end portions constituting or resembling pins or studs which fit into the adjoining sockets. Means can be provided for reducing the likelihood of unintentional withdrawal or expulsion of pins or studs from their sockets.
A drawback of such chairs is that, when a single section of the frame becomes loose, it unduly affects the stability of the entire chair. This is due to the fact that the sections of the frame are not directly secured to each other. Moreover, the making of pairs of sockets or through holes in each of the legs contributes to the cost of assembly and unduly weakens the legs. Attempts to dispose the sockets in each leg at different levels contribute to greater stability of the chair but the cost is not reduced by such distribution of the sockets. An additional drawback of the just described conventional chairs is that they cannot be readily stacked in a small area. This is due to the fact that the legs do not extend outwardly beyond the polygon which is formed by the sections of the frame, i.e., the legs are disposed exactly at the corners of such polygon.